Dr Andrew Wakefield was right all along

This piece was originally published on the author’s Substack blog and is republished with permission. Please consider subscribing to A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie and follow her work at the World Council for Health. For her paid subscribers, a 16-minute audio version plus some supplementary material is provided at the end of the original upload.

 

Do you believe in coincidences?

Last month I received an email from Mrs Bridget Wakefield, Dr Andrew Wakefield’s mother. It turned out she lives in Bath, my home town, birthplace of A Better Way and just a stone’s throw from the World Council for Health offices! She asked whether we could meet.

There were all sorts of things going round in my head as I set off on foot to find Mrs Wakefield. Who was she? What did she want from me? How had she weathered the longstanding and relentless demonisation of her son, I wondered?

A spritely though frail Mrs Wakefield greeted me with a warm smile. We fell into easy conversation right away and I learned that she is now 93 years old, a former doctor, a mother of five, and a grandmother. In her working years, Bridget used her maiden name and was known as Dr Bridget Matthews when she was practising as a general practitioner in Bath and the county of Gloucestershire to the north. Bath was Bridget’s home town and she felt lucky to be appointed to a single-handed practice on the Royal Crescent as a young GP. With her wealth of medical experience, we discussed what being a GP meant in the “old days”. Very hands-on, Bridget had especially enjoyed doing home visits and home deliveries, which was commonplace not so long ago.

Andrew’s father, Dr Graham Wakefield, was a Consultant Neurologist at University College Hosptial in London but gave this up to come to Bath so that the family could be together after a two-year period of only being together at weekends. Winning a sought-after position out of 26 applicants, Dr Graham Wakefield worked at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, where incidentally I still hold an honorary contract, and with the Neurosurgical Center at Bristol’s Frenchay Hospital. According to Mrs Wakefield, they had 50 really happy years in Bath.

Andrew is their secondborn and Mrs Wakefield told me that he had been Head Boy at King Edwards School in Bath, and Rugby Captain too. He was one of those children that just got on with things and never gave his parents any cause for concern. To the contrary, they were always tremendously proud of him. This resonated with me. I too was an all-rounder—conscientious, academically at ease, sporty, squash captain, never gave my parents any trouble, etc.—and so I suddenly, curiously, felt like I knew him. How hard it must have been for this mother and father, both dedicated and well-respected doctors, when their beloved son was accused of professional misconduct.

A report from Andrew’s school rugby coach said the following:

Under his captaincy the side has been very successful. He set a superb example on and off the field of discipline, sportsmanship and attitude and I can only thank him most sincerely. One of the best I’ve known, and certainly of the best that King Edward’s School has produced.

 

What was Dr Andrew Wakefield’s “crime”?

In 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and a senior researcher in the University Departments of Medicine and Histopathology at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine, published a paper in the Lancet with his colleagues entitled: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.

Dr Wakefield’s special interest was inflammatory bowel disease and this paper reported a case series of 12 children with developmental disorders whose mothers also described a constellation of bowel symptoms appearing shortly after their child’s vaccination.

Wakefield’s co-authors included specialist physicians in psychiatry, histopathology, radiology and gastroenterology. After carefully documenting their research findings in the paper, the investigators cautiously concluded (emphasis added):

We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and it’s possible relation to this vaccine.

As a medical researcher reading the paper for the first time, without all the accompanying hubris of 1998, I can assure you that the conclusions of this expert group were entirely appropriate: more research was indeed needed. Words like “may” and “possible” suggested a high level of uncertainty among the researchers about a causal link. At a subsequent press conference, Wakefield suggested that it may be prudent to use single vaccines instead of the MMR triple vaccine until this could be ruled out, which sounds like common sense to me as both a doctor and a mother.

 

As a mother or father, wouldn’t you want to know about Dr Wakefield’s and colleagues’ concerns?

If there is the slightest chance that a medical intervention may harm my children, I would rather not do it, especially if it’s for preventing an infection that may not happen in any case. How about you?

I have three children, all of whom received the childhood vaccination schedule recommended at the time. I never questioned vaccine efficacy or safety until Gardasil came out. With Gardasil, I did not understand why three injections were required, and, given the increasing prevalence of chronic illness among teenagers, I chose not to vaccinate my youngest with this particular vaccine. With hindsight, I guess I was becoming vaccine-concerned…

I had started to wonder, why are so many vaccines needed in any case, and is it safe to give several together? What research had been done on this? What’s more, are childhood infections really that dangerous? Women and men of my generation and older must remember getting taken to measles, rubella and chickenpox ‘parties’ to ‘catch’ childhood infections—it was well-known that getting these infections as a child was preferable to getting them as an adult because the course of illness was usually very mild.

I now wish I had paid attention to Dr Wakefield’s concerns at the time when I was raising my young family, as both developmental issues and inflammatory bowel disease are conditions manifest among my children and those of my peers today. Like autism, the prevalence of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis has skyrocketed in the last 30 to 40 years, with little attention paid by health authorities as to the causes of this phenomenon.

University professors, among other scientists, have since published studies that show that childhood vaccination schedules are associated with serious health effects that continue to be ignored by drug regulatory agencies and pharmacovigilance bodies worldwide. In addition, research studies presenting evidence that questions the safety of the childhood vaccination schedule, such as this 2021 paper by Lyons-Weiler and Thomas, continue to be targeted for retraction.

In 2020/21, Professor Brian Hooker and Dr Neil Miller conducted a study comparing the health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children and found developmental delays, asthma, gastrointestinal disorders and ear infections significantly higher among vaccinated children. I’ve had difficulty accessing their 2021 paper entitled Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children, published in the Journal of Translational Science. Perhaps the DOI link will work for you? The reference is 10.15761/JTS.1000459.

In any event, a book detailing the strong case against childhood vaccination is to be published soon and I shall alert you to it when it is. Be prepared for a barrage of fearful and polarising “anti-vaxxer” propaganda in the press.

 

So why was Dr Andrew Wakefield vilified?

At the time of the Wakefield study, the UK Government had just produced a plan to roll out MMR vaccines to all under-fives around the country. Andrew asked them to hold it back until safety could be assured, but was told it was not possible.

According to Mrs Wakefield’s, a freelance Sunday Times reporter by the name of Brian Deer launched an attack on Andrew with such voracity that it was “as if he had been told to destroy the man who was going to upset the vaccine programme”. Amazingly, Deer is still on Andrew’s case, having published a book as recently as 2020 about his award-winning investigation that destroyed a doctor’s career. The book is called The Doctor who Fooled the World and is published by John Hopkins Press, the university known for the Covid Vaccine Tracker and other Covid activities.

What curious timing indeed that Deer’s book should come out in the year Covid vaccines were launched. Was this to make sure we all know what happens when the bearers of the mighty pen and power of corporate media declare vaccine-concerned doctors to be “‘anti-vaxxers”?

Despite myself, I had to laugh when I read Andrew Wakefield described by Deer’s book reviewer as “one of the darkest figures of our time […]”. My goodness, when we have such an extraordinary selection of truly evil villains to choose from!

Perhaps we can find Deer’s alter ego in his new suspense novel, Blind Trial. I wonder what inspired this fictional tale about silencing a medical doctor who discovers fraud in a vaccine trial? From the marketing blurb, it’s about “a sexy, smart, but ethically challenged man, who is sent on a special assignment to keep […] a physician at the trial’s flagship clinical center quiet”. The author certainly appears to be an expert on the subject matter of the “ethical challenges” that pharmaceutical industry lackeys tasked with “special assignments” may face. How sexy and smart is he, I wonder?

 

How to keep ethical doctors quiet

The corporate media’s demonisation of Dr Andrew Wakefield was relentless and continues today. Andrew’s professional hearing went on for three years and, with the General Medical Council desperate to find him guilty of something, he was eventually found guilty of a “callous disregard for children”.

However, parents of allegedly callously disregarded children totally disagreed and tried to set the record straight. They wrote the letter below, which concludes with the sentence (emphasis original):

We are appalled that these doctors have been the subject of this protracted enquiry in the absence of any complaint from any parent about any of the children who were reported in the Lancet paper.